Idea, Suggestion and Complaint Aggregators

Typology

Tom Powell:

"the idea and suggestion management space has essentially three types of vendor offerings (some bleed across categories):

1. Centralized aggregators: Get Satisfaction, Suggestion Box, FeVote, Featurelist

Anyone can start a product or company page on these sites to submit ideas, suggestions, or complaints which are then voted up or down, Digg-style, and commented on. Companies pay for access to data, more powerful features, and the ability to “claim” pages and register official employee moderators. Similar to review sites like Epinions, the conversation will happen on these sites with or without you.

2. Tool providers: SalesForce Ideas Management, Uservoice, IdeaScale, Get Satisfaction, Kindling.

These systems provide similar functionality to the above sites but are controlled by and run by the companies themselves. They include features such as ratings or up/down votes, moderation, limiting the number of votes per user, running time-limited contests, limiting access to certain groups, and automatically searching for duplicate ideas during idea submission.

3. Integrated innovation management suites: Imaginatik, Brainbank, SalesForce Ideas Management, BrightIdea, Spigit.

The idea management portion of these suites generally have more robust capabilities such as weighting the contribution of particular users according to expertise and trust, creating virtual currency systems, providing enterprise class security, and customizing information captured. By integrating idea capture and prioritization into a more robust and sophisticated system, companies can then evaluate the costs of ideas, put them through formal review processes, and track performance of ideas from conception to execution." (http://coinnovative.com/guest-author-post-on-readwriteweb-get-satisfaction-leads-among-idea-aggregators/)